All in The Washington Post
Here’s how ready I was to disapprove of Taco Bell Defy.
I had just eaten a lunch of nettle-ramp soup, foraged from my own yard in Shoreview, Minn. I was also — and you’re going to think I’m making this up, but I’m not — scheduled to leave the next day on a flight from Minneapolis to San Francisco, in order to, among other things, make an anchovy-vinaigrette salad for Alice Waters. That really happened. You can ask my wife, Mary Jo.
Anyway, that gives you some idea.
On Dec. 11, a tiny electric spark of a woman named Lucie Peyraud — Lulu to all who know her — gathered four generations of family around her in a Provencal farmhouse and celebrated her 100th birthday. I’m going to come back to her in a minute, but it’s worth noting for now that the event was largely lost amid American headlines about an Alabama Senate race and California wildfires. Lulu is not the woman most of us think of when we think about how French food came to America. For that, there is an official story.